Since the invention of the telephone in the late 1800s, telephone systems have been one of the most used and relied on systems for personal and business communications between individuals. Since the telephones conception, technology surrounding telephone systems has rapidly progressed from telephone landlines to cellular phones and hosted soft phones. As such, a telephone system for a business may have analog, digital, or Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) capabilities or a combination thereof. As this technology progresses, the world is increasingly becoming more connected and more individuals, businesses, organizations, and other entities are looking to their telephone systems as a way to provide marketing and helpful announcements beyond the generic hold messages and music. The ability to provide near universal devices and software to provide on-hold content has become increasingly difficult and expensive as more individuals carry cell phones and more businesses, organizations or other entities utilize either cell phones or landlines with different communication capabilities or protocols to conduct their personal and business communications.
A continual need to place calls on-hold exists for businesses and entities as well as individuals. Examples of reasons to place a caller on-hold include, but are not limited to, a temporary excess volume of calls, a need to confer with others, a need to research information pertaining to the call discussion, a need to answer another call, a need to reroute the call to the correct individual, or simply a need to perform an action and/or a function remote from the telephone. The use of a hold function with telephone systems is common with private businesses, organizations, or other entities such as offices with a receptionist or an auto attendant, government agencies, fire departments, police departments, and other municipal departments with telephone systems on the premises, which manage inbound and outbound telephone circuits, provide voice storage for their staff, and route inbound and outbound calls.
In placing a call on-hold, the telephone system typically requires the call to maintain an “off-hook” status. An off-hook status exists when the telephone line is in use regardless of whether there is an active voice conversation occurring. The off-hook status is indicated by maintaining a certain load impedance on an analog telephone circuit, or maintaining a certain signaling or call station condition on a digital or VoIP circuit. During the time the caller is placed on-hold and an off-hook status is maintained, no human audible signal or sound is present within the telephone system. As a result, the party(s) remaining on and listening to the on-hold call hear silence or incidental background noise, such as static or white noise, emanating from the telephone system, or network until the call resumes. Most individuals, organizations, businesses, and other entities do not like the silence while a call is on-hold and callers typically find silence undesirable, annoying, and longer than some form of distraction, such as music or announcement. In addition, callers are more likely to hang up during a silent hold than when music or messages are playing and callers consistently overestimate the amount of time spent on-hold when the call is silent.
Another issue with silent on-hold calls is that unless the caller or the “on-hold” party is particularly observant, it is difficult to ascertain if the call is remaining in an “on-hold” status, if some technical fault has occurred, or an operator error has caused the call to be terminated. This is especially common with technical peculiarities specific to calls originating or terminating in VoIP or cellular telephone apparatuses and systems. As such, individuals, businesses, organizations, and other entities continue to desire to keep the caller on-hold engaged and certain that they are still on-hold and not disconnected. Beyond music, the time the caller spends on-hold may be harnessed to market products, services, or provide informative announcements.
Most large corporations or organizations with sufficient budgets for complex telephone systems provide a human-audible signal through the telephone system while a call is on-hold, so that listening party(s) hear something other than silence until the call resumes. The most common form of human-audible signal is a periodic sequence of audio tones, music, or a combination of music and spoken voice announcements. Many large businesses use the on-hold time to market products and services to the caller. Many other organizations or entities provide music to pass the time, which may be interspersed, mixed, or layered with various announcements. Currently, the systems required to provide mixed or layered messages with current content and announcement are complex and expensive, and as such are not affordable or feasible for many small businesses, organizations, and public entities to use. Therefore, while many public institutions, such as public safety entities, desire to use the on-hold time to provide educational announcements to callers regarding fire prevention, crime prevention, safety, and other public service announcements, most institutions generally do not have the budget, expertise or in-house capabilities for programming, using, and maintaining such a system. Moreover, while some municipalities may provide generic non-dated announcements, such as hours of the offices of the municipality, they are not able to easily provide information that changes regularly such as information about current events, or even changes to the hours of operation, like summer or holiday hours. As such, most systems, as described below, are set to provide a single audio loop that never changes. This is particularly problematic since many systems start the audio loop at the same spot each time a caller is placed on-hold. In addition, repeat callers may become annoyed listening to the same audio each time the callers are placed on-hold.
Existing telephone switching apparatuses and systems in the marketplace are capable of internally generating periodic tones, or providing an analog audio signal input connection so that an external device may be connected to supply the on-hold signaling. Most of these systems pipe in music through the telephone system when a caller is on-hold by utilizing a feed of a local radio stations, vinyl record players, analog reel-to-reel, or cassette audio tape players. However, these systems generally do not allow timely interspaced announcements and also have been discouraged due to various legal issues, copyright issues, mechanical unreliability, and magnetic media wear issues. As a result, manufacturers have created and marketed devices with improved media including Compact Disc, DVD optical media, semiconductor memory, and removable USB storage mediums; however, these systems do not solve many of the problems identified above. While some of these devices permit changes to the stored audio program(s) by means of removable memory, USB storage mediums, or connection to a modem or network, the creation of the audio file and the programming of the system is complex and difficult. Some systems even require the manufacturer to customize the audio programs for the individuals, business, organization, or other entity, which is very expensive over time. For the above devices, the configurations may include (1) a device or system in which the manufacturer, seller or service provider, authors or edits announcement scripts, provides voice and musical talent, produces, records, and edits the audio program on a rental, recurring, or one-time purchase basis, or (2) as a standalone device where the end-user produces their own audio programming and uploads it to the device in analog or digital form via a storage medium or a computer interface. In the aforementioned cases, the audio player device is very simple, and concerns itself merely with playing back the single audio program as it was previously prepared external to itself by the end user or the creative solution manufacturer. Any changes to a single announcement, adding, or deleting an announcement requires revising externally and replacing the whole audio file on the storage medium of choice.
The abovementioned existing solutions may be adequate for an end user desiring a simple musical selection to which they obtained the proper legal rights to play for callers, in a loop, or where a combined voice announcement and background music program may be created once and if the operator of the system does not require or does not desire to change the audio recording. However, the above system is not suitable for an end user who desires to change the audio file or add announcement now or in the future. For example, consider an on-hold audio program that consists of a single musical selection of 4 minutes length, and 3 voice announcements consisting of a greeting/identification, and several marketing announcements as follows:                [REF1] Voice announcement 1: “Thank you for calling our company. Your call is important to us, and we will return to the line shortly.”        [REF2] Voice announcement 2: “Our spring product line will be introduced March first. Please visit our showroom to learn about our new products.”        [REF3] Voice announcement 3: “Would you like more information about our product X? Please ask our representative when they return to the call.”        
In using the above exemplary announcements, a typical program, recorded as a single audio file for existing systems would begin with a music selection or with an initial greeting such as [REF 1] playing at full volume or fading up to full volume. Music would then play for an arbitrary time duration at full volume as desired by the operator the telephone system, followed by the music amplitude fading out to a background level and the greeting/identification announcement playing one of the above [REF1]-[REF3], followed by the music amplitude fading back to full volume. After an additional arbitrary time duration, the music fades down to a background level and another one of the above announcements [REF1]-[REF3] after which music fades back in, and an additional arbitrary duration of music playing passes, the music fades out, and the cycle of music and providing an announcement is repeated in a loop. The cycle of music, announcement, or a combination thereof continues until the hold status ends. The total length of the above exemplary audio program may vary with music and voice content layered on one another, however, to make any changes to the announcement or add an announcement requires the creation of a new single audio file including the background music.
An exemplary prerecorded audio program or file as described above is expected to be uploaded or stored in the audio playback device as a single file, and the device typically plays the audio program file back continuously in a loop. The audio output of the playback device would be connected to the audio program input on the telephone system, and thus calls placed in an on-hold status would be connected to the audio program, which by design would rarely change.
The examples of systems and devices described above are extremely costly to the end user and require considerable audio production skills and professional audio recording equipment to produce the audio program which is uploaded as a single file. As such, most systems are out of reach for most entities and organizations, and the system all but eliminates the ability to provide current, timely announcements. More specifically, current systems require specialized skills to create, meld, and render the program into a single file of music and announcements in a format that existing audio playback devices support, and to install the program in the playback device. These skills and the required equipment are out of the reach to all but the largest corporations and organizations, unless the business pays expensive rental fees for the equipment and expensive service fees to a service provider to record and update messages. Therefore, for most businesses, organizations, and entities, these systems are not configured to or are cost prohibitive in providing updated timely announcements while callers are on-hold.
As more businesses and public institutions desire to tailor their on-hold time and use it to market products and services to the callers and provide timely announcements, particularly to existing customers and people in the community, a desire exists for an easy to use, simple, and cost effective solution. Additionally, the mixing/layering of music and voice content may cause the voice content to be difficult to hear, unless specialized steps are taken. The different communication configurations or protocols used in conjunction with the mixing/layering of music and voice content may also result in undesirable noise such as pops, clicks, and garbling when the music and voice content is played simultaneously. Therefore, there is a need for a simplified device or system that allows end users to make frequent changes to the program, has reduced costs of maintaining and creating audio content, does not require expensive monthly fees, does not require specialized skills and expertise in programming or formulating of audio content, provides seamless music and voice content mixing without undesirable noise, and may be integrated into any telephone system regardless of the telephone business or organization's system protocol, i.e., analog, digital, or VoIP.